As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Network attached storage (NAS) is one subset of information handling system technology devoted primarily to storing and provisioning data for a plurality of users. From a user perspective, NAS hardware is preferably cost effective to acquire and maintain as well as substantially continuously available or at least incurs minimal downtime. In certain respects, the achievement of availability and low cost maintenance may be furthered using some of the same mechanisms.
Today, organizations typically deploy one or more NAS devices that use RAID or redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks to achieve data availability. In practice, a RAID may be implemented in software or hardware. Software RAID is often used to reduce the costs of NAS RAID deployment. Hardware and software RAID generally may be employed to accomplish the same goals, however, each has its own nuances as to how it is treated by the operating system (OS).
In a hardware implementation, a RAID controller typically hides the information storage devices from the OS and creates an abstraction of storage called logical units that are exposed to the OS. To determine the status of a disk set, one or more calls to the RAID controller must typically be made. In software RAID implementations the information storage devices are typically exposed to the OS. In addition, RAID may be configured using a software driver included in the OS and RAID functionality is typically achieved at a volume level not a logical unit level. For example, a volume manager graphical user interface (GUI) in Microsoft Windows may be queried to ascertain the status of the software RAID volumes.